ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how the Talmud imagines its own community, how it projects its being in Babylonia, its raison d'?tre, the status of Palestine, and its own status vis-à-vis Palestine as well. It also argues that multiple passages in the Talmud add up to a virtual diasporist manifesto, acknowledging that there are other much less sanguine voices to be found. The Babylonian Talmud itself produces thematically the image of diaspora that would ultimately project it as the text of diaspora throughout later Jewish history. Robin Cohen –along with most authorities –continues to stress the allegedly traumatic nature of a 'victim diaspora', using the Jewish experience as paradigmatic. As such, a sense of trauma or even discomfort is falsified as a necessary condition for the existence of a diaspora by the very historical experience of the putatively prototype diaspora, that of the Jews, as a set of universally applicable criteria for the identification of diasporas.
